Entertainment

Faviki Brings Wikipedia and User Notes to Social Bookmarking (The Startup Review)

Company Name

20-word Description

Faviki is a semantic bookmarking tool which allows people to organize bookmarks using Wikipedia concepts as tags.

CEO's Pitch

Faviki is a tool that brings together social bookmarking and Wikipedia. It allows you to tag webpages with Wikipedia concepts, categorizing them automatically. This solves the problem of having different tags for the same concept and makes your tags better organized. Faviki is powered by DBpedia, which extracts structured information from Wikipedia. It also uses the Zemanta API for automatic tag suggestions, and mashes it with Google AJAX Language API to make multilingual semantic tagging possible. There are currently 5.6 million tags you can choose from - 2.7 million English and 2.9 million tags from 13 other languages.

Mashable's Take

The main aspects of the Faviki utility have already been written out by the company’s founder, Vuk Milicic. So rather than get deep into detail about the Zemanta and Google AJAX Language APIs, let’s explore what Faviki can be to the average user as the social bookmarking tool it is designed to be.

The connection made between bookmarking and Wikipedia might be lost on some, and perhaps a bit purposeless for the diverse number of reasons people interact with websites and their individual pages. Not all subjects have ample representation within Wikipedia. But the suggestions made via the tags provided through Faviki can be helpful at times. And users can always add their own tags if need be. As with most bookmarking services, it can keep your list of bookmarks better sorted for future reference if you’re collecting items to group closely together. And the ability to share links with friends and view topics that Faviki finds applicable to one or more bookmarks is an intelligent way to manage information.

Much of its effectiveness of course depends on how extensively you use the service. The quick transfers of a bookmarklet in your browser’s standard toolbar facilitates the process considerably. Plugin installations in Firefox, for instance, can be a hurdle some don’t wish to jump past. With Faviki, you don’t have to.

Another great item in Faviki’s arsenal is the ability to present notes along with a bookmark. Tagging is a useful search feature, for sure. No question about that. But to have the option to tell friends or the entire membership at large what it is exactly you’ve bookmarked or why you’ve chosen to share it can bring a superb level of guidance into the system.

Sign-up is as easy as you’d like it to be. Enter an email address, choose an account name and password choice, plus a language specification (15 in all), and you’re set. If you’d like to make a change to your username, time zone, or determine whether or not you want to be sent a newsletter, you can do so simply by clicking the ‘edit profile’ setting in the top right section of the page.

Is Faviki a smarter engine than, say, the newly revised Delicious? I have no reservations in thinking that many won’t convert, if only for the very sensible reason that they’re already well-invested and attuned to the ways of the sector’s benchmark. Others will enjoy this beta more than the Yahoo-owned favorite, though. If you’re willing to try something different, or have never fallen under the Delicious spell, Faviki is quite good. Simple and powerful are two elements it exhibits, and the smart design can grow on the user rather quickly. Altogether, Faviki is impressive. For a social bookmarking service, that’s certainly saying a lot.

Editor's Note:This post is part of an ongoing series at Mashable - The Startup Review, Sponsored by Sun Microsystems Startup Essentials. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.

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